Once considered by Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer as a plague on all software and the work of the devil, open source software is now accepted with open arms by Microsoft, even evoking their active support.

Intrepid Ibex, the codename for Ubuntu 8.10, has today finally reached the pinnacle, without hesitation. Although the new version of the popular Linux distribution hasn't won any new altitude records, it still brings along a number of interesting features to make life easier for users andadministrators. High among these features are some rejuvenated programs.

Although OpenOffice.org is an open source project with its own community, the core team that does the bulk of the actual coding and quality assurance is based in Hamburg, Germany. Recently, I had a chance to visit the developers behind this key open source project.